The bad of NWN2

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This is long, just because I have much to say. Get the popcorn. This is personal, so I could stop being angry in all other topics.

Now, I'm done fed up with this game. But I still feel inclined to make a very thorough description of everything that's wrong with it, and maybe it will prevent a few people from making a purchase they will later regret, because this game is in no way a sequel to Neverwinter Nights.

A. Nights of the Old Neverwinter 2

NWN2 seems to be based on the KotOR engine, and that would explain an awful lot about this game. If that is wrong, then I shudder to think how (and most importantly why) they managed to make the beautiful Aurora look so much like KotOR's core, but I think Aurora, the core of NWN, didn't even **** in these woods. The rest of this assumes that my guess on the origin of the Electron engine is correct. Why one would use a locked resource exclusively singleplayer engine for a sequel to one of the most moddable and multiplayable games ever is a puzzle. My guess is because Obsidian simply didn't know how to work the NWN engine, so they took to something they managed to butcher before (KotOR2 and all of its woes come to mind). The modification of the core was apparently minimal. Let's address certain RPG must-haves that NWN2 conspicuosly lacks and how they relate to the game core.

- You are unable to multiple-select your characters in a party under your control. Why could you do that in every single Infinity engine game and most every other RPG with a party system, but not in NWN2? Because that's the way it was in KotOR.

- You cannot select the character under your control by clicking on them. Why? Because that's how it was in KotOR, and it stayed that way.

- Your character creation screen came straight out of the game I won't name. But it's about jedi knights, so you can guess.

- Item creation? Workbench? Components? Oh, right KotOR.

- Animations came straight out of the same game. They're just as basic, alas much more noticeable given the change of perspective.

- Your companions cannot die because they're essential plot NPCs. They will simply get up like it's nobody's business after being butchered in battle, just like KotOR. Plus, they're forced on you, and you have no choice but to take them until you can get to Ebon Haw... er, Neverwinter, and leave them there.

- Cutscenes? Check. World map? Check. NPCs with no freedom of selection of class? Check. Auto-level button? Not here! Okay, so it's a regressed KotOR engine.

B. D- for effort.

Let's look at this seriously. For Neverwinter Nights 2 Obsidian:

- licensed a (perfectly unsuitable) engine that they did not develop
- refrained from modifying that engine to suit the needs of the game
- used a pre-made animation model, developed once again not by them
- re-used most of the sound effects, voices, and music from a game they did not make

What have they been doing during the development of the game? This feels like that high school project for which you are given a month, but you start three days before the due date. This is not rushed. I have seen ingenious, innovative rushed games that were, despite their raw state, incredibly fun to play. There's nothing new in NWN2, it doesn't even qualify for the title of an old-style RPG. It's simply a poorly modified Knights of the Old Empire brought into Forgotten Realms setting with very little functionality.


C. Notneverwinter Nights 2

Obsidian not only forgot the saying that if it's not broken, one shouldn't fix it. They willfully decided to go against it and stripped Neverwinter Nights of just about everything that made it a good game to make the so-called sequel. A dedicated NWN player like me can't help but express dumb misunderstanding about the amount of genuinely great things that did not make it in this game's release. In the order of noticing...

- You cannot dual-wield from the quickslot. You cannot use a sword and shield from the quickslot. Every time you change to a ranged weapon, you need to re-equip your melee weapon by going to the inventory and doing it by hand. NWN weapon system was perfect

- Inventory. Who stole a paycheck for designing this travesty? The icons are about as informative as C3PO's beeps. It has 128 one-cell slots each of which can fit any item, potentially enabling you to carry one hundred and twenty eight scythes on your person. If the elementary "realism" and "roleplay" connotations of this do not worry you like they do me, then I hope you will at least agree with me that the inventory is nigh impossible to manage visually. Inventory tetris was a part of my pack-rat roleplaying experience. I liked the fact that even if I was inhumanly strong, I could carry at most 30 greatswords.

- When you dropped a sword on the floor in NWN, it was a sword laying on the floor. In NWN2 it's a loot bag. Geez.

- You have more quickslots than in NWN, but they are inaccessible by hotkeys. In a way, you have less quickslots, but more useless slowslots. Why in the hells can't I drag a spell from the quickcast into one of those?

- Character animations - staggered, unrealistic, ten frame walk/run cycle. Let me walk. Let me jog. Let me sprint. Let me step carefully. Let me feel alive on screen! NWN had that, why doesn't this game? It's a big part of roleplaying. I don't know about you, but my roleplay experience involves walking in towns, running away from the enemy, and being alive while standing. Looking around curiously, crossing my arms, shrugging, putting that heavy sword on my shoulder, playing with my bow. More roleplaying this game is missing.

- What happened to the camera? Why is there simply no angle from which I can see everything? Every camera mode has an issue with it. Free camera in this game? What's the point, you cannot even make a selection of more than one character at once to take advantage of its "strategy" factor. Chase camera turning lags unintuitively so you have to move where you want to look. The topdown camera insists to zoom on my avatar whenever I come close to a wall, treating me to a perfectly useless view of my character instead of the somewhat useful view of her surroundings. Walk through a door the wrong way? Be treated to an awkward zoom-in. Things like that. I don't want to get stuck looking...

- ...at the character models in this game. NWN was four years ago, it was reasonably schematic, but you could create a semblance of the character you imagine in NWN, and just roleplay the rest. NWN2, with its realistic character models leaves very little to imagination and constrains you to a choice of a few hideous faces, no selection of facial hair (Dwarves? Beards? Give me a choice, if you insist on realism!), and females looking perfectly like transvestites in a wig. What happened to shapely curvaceous female models, stocky and muscular male models, fat and skinny varieties of both, height scaling? We were promised those things but not delivered.

- The weapons are about as basic and schematic as NWN. Some seem to have been imported directly, and they're not open to modification as they were in NWN. Armours seem to be different textures placed on the same mesh. Chain shirt, leather armour, chain mail all look like a football uniform with shoulder pads. In NWN we had a choice of making our armour slick and streamlined, or covering it with heavy panzer spikes and plates. Here we do not.

Now, I know that in relation to the aforementioned points many would say "But NWN didn't have all that at its release!". A thoroughly ridiculous argument. The job of a sequel is to improve the final state of its predecessor, not find solace in the fact that it's just as bad as a game from four years back.

- Most of the emotes are gone. I realize that KotOR didn't have emotes, and Obsidian just doesn't have anyone in their art department worth their paycheck to add those things in, but sitting on the ground, waving, feighing death, praying, and meditating have become essential parts of my NWN roleplay experience. I'm glad to know that in this game I can stand motionlessly like the Tin Man or kneel as if I am about to get knighted by an imaginary entity.

- WASD controls have been made useless. One can no longer make precise maneuvering with them. They were simply awkwardly adapted from KotOR without the option to change their sensitivity.

- Spells look flashy. For many, flashy equates to good. Unfortunately the spell effects all look like coloured spraypaint being sprayed over the area of effect. Lighting effects resemble perfectly two-dimensional effects from 1996 made in a higher resolution, and spells fail to evoke any semblance of belief. That's not what I imagine casting magic spells looks like. This is not a release of arcane energy, this is effects for the sake of effects. Not to mention they are repetitive and lend no hand in visual recognition of the spells being cast. Fading buffs? Oh, look, an icon appeared over my head signifying the fade of the buff. Where is the NWN system with perfectly recognizeable spell effects on the top of the screen that inform unambiguously of their expiration? Instead we've inherited the uninformative + and - icon system, slightly modified from KotOR.

- The interiours are infuriating. For every pointless placeable that takes up sixteen hundred polygons, you lose framerate. For every placeable, that stacks, and accounts for abysmal performance of the game. At the same time, despite all the detail, the placeable is perfectly unnoticeable until your character gets stuck in it due to faulty pathfinding, and gets killed. Surprising how dead environments, locked doors, trees you wish weren't there as they obstruct your view, simple piles of garbage, and unlootable crates are given so much detail while your character remains a semblance of a wax model with no life in it.

- In 2006, this game has no vertex weighting. Hair doesn't ruffle in the wind, neither do clothes and cloaks. They did in NWN four years ago, but not here. Because, yet again, KotOR had no such feature. Cloaks don't even hold a candle to NWN's. This graphics engine is not new and improved, it's simply obsolete and inefficient. Stillborn.

- Combining the actions and context sensitive menu in the right click is one of those decisions for which designers should have never passed their usability class. Both get in the way of the other, accounting for much frustration. Imagine "shoot" and "use" bound to the same key in Half-life. That's the way I feel about it.

- Minimap is not only confusing, it's useless. Outdoor areas are not shrouded, so you can never tell where you have been and where you haven't. Round view window is painfully inconvenient. Yet again, outdoor map is textured, rendering it impaired as a navigation tool. There is no fog of war to speak of. I enter the dungeon, and I magically know its layout right away. Give me a break.

- Stores. Oh boy. I have seventy items to sell that have the same icon, I have to click one hundred fourty times to choose item and confirm sale. Why does the enter button not work for Yes in the message box? Even a cretin knows that Enter equals Ok on whatever tool menu is on the screen right now. Merchants run out of gold but have no gold counter on them.

- Non-contact schematic battles. There are next no battle animations, cleaves, flurries are missing. Hits are accompanied by the blade clipping through the enemy, with a ridiculous splash of blood accompanying the hit. The battles are less exciting than PnP as they lack any flourish yet leave nothing to the imagination. Bows have no arrows in them. Oh please, I know KotOR had no complex projective weapons, but would you at least try?

- Animations don't fire properly. You stop pretending to interact with a locked box long before the lock comes off. You step away from the trap before it is disarmed.

- Pathfinding in this game is a joke, to the point where characters simply warp to the locations as if they lag, skipping the pathfinding stage. And that's me, playing on stable thirty frames per second, leaving absolutely no room for frame lag.

- The world transition trigger is huge, ineffable, resembles the UN logo, and destroys immersion.

- There are no mounts or mounted combat, but I must be crazy to ask the developers to implement that when they forgot to even change the basic functionality of an action/adventure game to adapt it for RPG use.

- There is no feeling of travel or exploration in this game. You hop in the Ebon Haw.. oh wait, there are no starships here, but you still just do hyper-space jumps from one key plot location to another. Random encounter, a key part of any serious D&D game, did not make it in here.


D. But it has a great OC!

Considering that OC is just another module for the game core and the OC wasn't even originally supposed to be a part of the NWN1 package, that very OC seems to be the only redeeming point of NWN2. Take it away, and NWN remains a great multiplayer and infinitely moddable game, and NWN2 remains a broken semifunctional KotOR engine.

- Why do people in my village speak with a texan accent? Why do the accents hop all over the world as I go from area to area? It was ridiculously funny when the squirrels in Open Season spoke with a scottish accent, I suppose Obsidian wanted to bring in some ridiculous comedy in the campaign by having wood elves that seemed to have just hopped off the train from Dublin.

- The dialog options never present any illusion of choice. Like someone said, most "character development" dialog options in this game can be replaced with three emoticons: . There's no interest in clicking on cookie-cutter dialog options which will inevitably lead to the same outcome.

- Dialog pause in OC. None of your party can act, but guess what, they still can take damage and die as the enemies do not get frozen by the dialog. Holy bad design, Batman!

- There is no freedom of choice in this game, and the difference between good and evil is that evil simply kills everyone, while good talks to them a bit and then kills everyone. Lovely roleplay.

- Where are romances? One universally mismatched option per gender? How engaging is that? You are a leader of your party, you will inevitably evoke personal feelings in your companions. Imagine Lord of the Rings without the Aragorn - Arwen romance. What good adventure story doesn't have a love story in it? Apparently, NWN2. Oh, wait, I asked about a good one.

- Archetype NPCs. Tank, thief, healer. If I wanted archetype NPCs, I'd have read Order of the Stick, to much more of my enjoyment. Neeshka claims people pick on her for her horns and tail, but she has no ****ing tail.

- The NPCs are forced onto you. Lone ranger? Not here. Skulking assassin? Not here. Antisocial mage? Not here. They stick with you faithfully on no premise even if you are a murderous psychopath, complete with their overused hooks and excuses for staying with you.

- Being evil. The campaign is simply not made for it. Nothing should stop me from murdering peasants for a few gold coins if that is what I want, but this game stops me. It's nearly impossible to maintain an evil alignment in this game to keep, say, assassin or blackguard class features within the frames of roleplay. The "evil" dialog options are mostly just obnoxious or rude. Rude does not equal evil. I'm rude. And obnoxious. But I'll give you a hand if you're drowning, and I will not ask for any compensation. In this game you end up inadvertently doing good deeds to just advance the plot.

- The OC has no exploration. You walk on a predetermined path without any opportunity (or point) to step off it. In the teeming city, you are met with sealed doors, dead randomly scattered houses and decorations, and NPCs with conveyor replies that have nothing to talk about. "Times are tough" indeed.

- The loot is boring. It was in NWN too, but I hoped this new improved campaign would address it. It didn't. The loot is still boring, there is just much less of it.

- The quests are all regurgitated nonsense that we saw in NWN. Go to area A, kill baddie B, and bring quest token Q to move on. Only this time you have the NPCs tag along with their...

- ...unbelievably moronic AI. Wait, the AI is simply absent, just like it was in KotOR series. Fortunately for KotOR, there was never a game situation in which your party wasn't five levels above the challenge rating of any mob, so you could lay back, draw the lightsaber, and enjoy the show. Just as fortunately for KotOR, there was hardly ever a situation in which your party member didn't shoot at the enemy, or didn't have a straight line to charge in melee, leaving no need for any pathfinding. In NWN2, the story is different. Enemies are on par with the party, and pathfinding is ridiculous, and the only intelligence these brainless automatons possess is the one you impart on them by micromanaging the battle in pause mode and wishing that the AI was simply not there.

- Side quests, where are they? Remember how you could play Baldur's Gate 2? You could complete it in a couple weeks of game time, or you could do side quests for months if that was what you wanted. NWN2 seems to be lacking just about any dialogs or NPCs that are not related to the main plot.

E. Sequel to E3's Best Online Multiplayer recepient

NWN was a great multiplayer game. The multiplayer was so great that I spent countless hours playing it, and I never played any other multiplayer game before. NWN was conceived on the premise of multiplayer and modability, with the engine build from the ground up to accomodate those two purposes. NWN2 was made upon a locked resource engine from a game that is exclusively singleplayer. That very design decision leaves so little in the area of multiplayer expectations, and the game delivers to most of my fears.

- The OC is non-multiplayable. It has dialog pauses, forced party transitions, a plot thoroughly incompatible with multiplayer (so which of the four of us is the main character?). Makes you remember how the NWN OC started perfectly compatible with multiplayer - a few friends in a city's military academy called to serve their homeland. Great hook! Everyone is equal, everyone can complete the tasks, and the plot is not character related. In NWN2, most dialogs make no sense whatsoever unless initiated by the main character. Seeing how the developers specifically designed the OC to not be played in multiplayer, it is not surprising.

- Custom modules need to be downloaded, as the tilesets which allowed for seamless client-server relationship in NWN are no longer used. To play in a custom server you need to get its files outside of the game and put them in some directory of the game before you can connect to that server. That might sound easy to me, as a professional software designer, or to you, as an experienced gamer, but maybe you are one of the many people I know for whom the suggestion would sound similar to "Oh, just take the valve covers off the motor, bore the engine block, and put in new pistons. It's easy". Not a good move to add this step in a multiplayer game without even an option to download custom content within the game. Unreal Tournament did that since long ago (1999), why can't NWN2 do it in 2006?

- Modules. Notice how the game starts to "unpack module" every time you enter an area. That's right, that is how big the new modules are. The whole NWN campaign was comprised of four modules - one for a chapter. NWN2 has one for a miniscule area. That is pretty much the limit of what one NWN server can host - larger areas simply exceed the memory addressing capacity of modern computers. Say bye-bye to any notion of persistent worlds unless you have a cluster of servers to host your small village comprised of four areas. Say bye-bye to what made NWN so popular with the online community, and what to this day keeps up the interest of the game not just from the players but also from BioWare.

F. But they will fix it all with patches!

Because BioWare still supports Neverwinter Nights? Remember, the sequel wasn't developed by BioWare, it was a completely different entity, and you probably remember its sole endeavor in the gaming industry until now - the sequel to one more game BioWare made that assembled more Game Of The Year awards than George Lucas has chins in 2003.

Remember how KotOR2 was released in the abhorrent unfinished state that it was? Remember how it was never brought to a perfectly playable and bug-free state by the developers? Was it because LucasArts was on the verge of bankrupcy and rushed the game to be released early, or was it just Obsidian's incompetence in developing sequels to BioWare masterpieces? The choice is pretty obvious, considering the fat bags of money of which the LucasArts headquarters is comprised.

If Obsidian's support of KotOR2 is of any indication, as it should be, then the future of Neverwinter Nights is not something that makes me smile, and the hope that everything will be patched and fixed is wishful thinking at its finest.

I uninstalled it. And I don't want my money back, I don't want to go play Oblivion, I don't want to use the toolset and make this game what I want it to be, because it's impossible. I just want Neverwinter Nights 2, which as of now is sure to never be made.

 

It would have been 100x better if anyone developed it. The result indicates that Obsidian didn't quite grasp the concept of development.

To be honest, if it comes to the point that Obsidian no longer exists because of this, I'll say they had it coming. I sure as hell am not buying any more games from them, and I don't see NWN2 sell in five years like NWN1 still does.

 

I wonder if comparisons to KotOR will have the negative effect you give to it since it was game of the year and lots of people liked it.

Quick slots and two weapon or weapon/shield. They've said that is going to be added, and indicated it just didn't get in in time and it wasn't seen as critical since it's just convenience. Lame; but still NWN was far from the perfection you seem to think it on release.

Cloaks. NWN didn't even show equipped cloaks until recently. NWN2's cloaks are there and they sway with body movement.

Side quests. I've had several in every main area so far and I'm only in Neverwinter.

And the game is bad because the tutorial wasn't tailor made for an old level 1 Ranger?

*shrug* I am really amazed at how focused people are here about not enjoying this game. I played when I got home from work last night, and the next thing I knew it was midnight.

The battles are a lot harder than the KotORs were that's for sure. I think there was maybe one or two fights in either of the KotORs that were challenging in the least. In this game, if I just rush into every fight like I could in the KotORs, I usually end up dead.

Could the game be improved? Sure, in many ways. Is it lots of fun as it is? You bet.

 

^ It sure as hell should draw negative connotations. KotOR was an exciting game, but it was at most an action/adventure to me. Not to mention exclusively single-player. Unreal Tournament was a GOTY too, but that doesn't lend it credibility to be the core for NWN2.

I tried to like it, but I struggle to find any point in its defense. The missing AI killed its battles for me, thus making it a chore getting from one plot point to another. If I have to force myself to go on playing, then the game just isn't worth it. I realize that it's a "Your experience may vary" case, but if anything is true, it would be the fact that this game took a dump on all things that made NWN great.

 

The campaign is not age related at all. The only part that makes you feel young is the tutorial where you are participating in the harvest fair competitions with some friends of yours from the village.

After that, you could be any age with an elf for a foster father.

@catbert - I understand KotOR-like is a big negative for you; what I was trying to say is that's probably not a big negative for the majority of people given how popular it was.

 

My main issue with the KotOR engine deal is not that this game is based on KotOR, but because NWN2's Electron engine was supposed to be improved and modified version of NWN's core. It just doesn't resemble that in any way.

There are two ways to interpret the results:

a) Obsidian spent three years ruthlessly removing features from Aurora, without adding anything new aside from a puzzling decision to introduce the game mechanics of KotOR into the system.

b) Obsidian took the KotOR engine, didn't touch the game mechanics, didn't bother to introduce any optimisation to accomodate the gameplay of NWN, and just made a half-arsed game.

I'm going with b. Just because the game is kind of okay, and because the multitude of its flaws doesn't really bother you doesn't make this game any less bad than it is. It just means that your standards are so low that you're enjoying a sequel which is worse than its originator in nearly every conceivable way.

Imagine that A New Hope would have been released with the visuals of 2005, and Revenge of The Sith had the effects straight out of 1977. Would you have liked Episode III? Unlikely. The climatic Mustafar battle just woulnd't have been the same with the ridiculously simple fight effects of the Ben Kenobi - Vader showdown from the original edition of Episode IV. That's the kind of game NWN2 is - a technologically degraded sequel.

 

^ Yeah. It's not so much improved as "adapted". From that point of view, Obsidian may have used an improved version of an adapted version of the Aurora engine. Or they could have just said that they'll use Odyssey right away.